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Research Article

No. 9 (2025): Dossier: "Mimesis in Philosophy and Literature"

Plastic Figures: Mimesis, Metamorphosis, Techniques of the Self

DOI
https://doi.org/10.64957/nesir.1799411
Submitted
16.04.2025
Published
23.10.2025

Abstract

While dominant idealist traditions in western philosophy tended to restrict mimesis to visual representations far removed from ideal Forms, a minor, yet nonetheless resilient genealogy of materialist thinkers has tended to focus on the mimetic nature of subjectivity itself. Building on the interdisciplinary field of mimetic studies sensitive to the plastic forms homo mimeticus can take, this essay furthers Catherine Malabou’s re-evaluation of form by outlining a new materialist genealogy of four plastic figures endowed with the capacity to both receive form and give form: namely, “figura,” “metamorphosis,” “techniques of the self,” and the “overman.” Reframed in the company of ancient (Plato, Homer), modern (Montaigne, Nietzsche), and contemporary (Hadot, Foucault) theorists, the essay argues, in broad genealogical strokes, that the mirroring concepts of plasticity and figura traverse key moments in the history of aesthetics. My wager is that plastic figures are endowed with performative powers central to techniques of subject formation that reach from antiquity to modernity into the present, furthering the field of mimetic studies.

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